Arcana

For his third and last full length film, Guilio Questi mixes art-house with exploitation and leaves me feeling like one of those crazy chickens from Death Laid An Egg. Initially this seems to be a horror film about a mother and son who do tarot readings and pretend to heal folks, whilst both of them have genuine powers that the son feels should be exploited more. The actual story itself then proceeds to be buried under a barrage of surreal imagery until the film ends.

That's not to say I didn't like it though. The horror elements are presented first, with the son healing their customers as they sit in a circle babbling (one of them pishes themselves into the bargain). The son also has hundreds of pictures of hands and random people arranged in specific patterns over which the son dangles animal teeth before dressing up like his mother with a pair of tights over his head. You know, the usual stuff teenagers get into.

The son seems to take a liking to a certain girl who comes for reading regarding herself and her boyfriend. She asks the mother for a love potion but the son isn't too happy decide to make his own, but doesn't quite know how. Around this time the tarot cards start playing themselves and dishes start moving around the kitchen, which gets worse when the son ties up his mother, starts cutting her breasts with a dagger, and gets the real love recipe from her.

Although up to this point we've already witnessed people with missing limbs being arrested from a queue in a bank, characters turning around to deliberately stare into the camera, and small kids dragging an egg on a string about for no reason, nothing quite prepared me for the "Family dancing to fiddle music while the mother vomits up live frogs while subway workers try and get on a subway train but also while another fiddler plays music to a bemused donkey being hoisted up a building scene". Have I ever mentioned that Questi used to work with Fellini?

Things get even more fragmented after that but what's the point in mentioning every crazy thing that happens? This is more of a weird trip than a film, and it's a pity Questi stopped making films after this, because I'd love to have seen his art-house take on other Italian Exploitation films like the Mad Max rip-off and the Jaws rip-off!

This weird , out-of-the-schemes movie is one of the few Giulio Questi's works. Rough and poorly made, but with some sense of measure (thus very real-life-looking) it occasionally slips into the usual clichés of trash 'b' gore - horror works but the overall result is surprisingly suggestive.

It happens sometimes that obscure directors happen to make something really outstanding , only to fall back again in mediocrity for the rest of their careers (remember Tobe Hooper ?) .

This spooky and politically incorrect tale of filth and horror is almost dead and gone: the movie is impossible to find , there must be still one copy in some wet vault (the grave of old movies) and folklore says that the director himself was looking for a copy of it.

A portrait of a slightly weird guy living with his mother, who is a fake clairvoyant. He is discovering his supernatural talents.

Unsettling is the right word for this film. People, waiting to collect their welfare, are being kidnapped without a reason. A metro stops in a tunnel, people start banging on the windows from the outside. Unsettling is also the relationship between the protagonist and his mother. She is hardly angry when he ties her to the bed or makes love with one of her costumers in front of her.

The second part is even less comprehensible than the first part already is. He collects stuff and people seem to get more and more crazy. It is lovely bizarre, still not the David Lynch or Luis Buñuel kind of bizarre, but sometimes not far from it. There's a fascinating piece of cinema with a monotonous gypsy player and the mother suddenly coughing up frogs. Or the one with people waiting silently outside the door, one man glances over his shoulder.

I found it hard to understand why things were happening like this. Usually films have too much explanation, this film is an example of the opposite. There's not much sense of logic. I guess one of the reasons was the unbalanced editing. Some more interesting, surreal scenes don't have enough time to work, and less interesting scenes could have been removed. Especially the final could have been better.

Nevertheless, this is a slow, but surprisingly entertaining film, subtle and yet politically incorrect. This might not come as a surprise as the director, Giulio Questi, is also the man behind a thriller on a chicken farm (Death laid an egg, 1968) and a cult western with gay cowboys (Django kill..., 1967). These were the only three films he made. He was the uncompromising kind of director and that's why his films are still unique. This film is supported with great performances and music. Lucia Bosé is very good as the over-protective mother, and Maurizio degli Esposti is just as fine as the weird son with the feminine hairdo (he only played in four films). Also Tina Aumont, famous for Fellini's Casanova, but in fact specialized in playing parts in the weirdest section of 70's cinema. I rate it 7/10 for mystery.

Mrs.Tarantino is the widowed wife of a poor worker from southern Italy living with her creepy son in a shabby block of industrial Milan.She plans to make money exploiting as a charlatan a crowd of rich dullards looking for supernatural advice like tarot and hand reading.The mother is an expert in magic rituals and cleverly uses it to lure her prey,while her son is a psychic.The problem arises when the son falls in love with her mother's client and uses his arcane powers to gain her love with devastating consequences...Extremely obscure and forgotten Italian horror movie with some nice surreal touches and often implied Oedipux complex.The score by Berto Pisano is fantastic with phenomenal violin motif.I hope that "Arcana" will be released on DVD soon.8 out of 10.

One of the more obscure of Italian horrors that are still accessible, and understandably if not deservedly so, Arcana is tricky stuff. Nominally a horror film though cleaving more towards the work of Bunuel and his like, more concerned with unravelling the structures that underpin modern living than freaking out the audience. The film announces itself at the outset, what is about to unfold is not a story but a game of cards, the opening and epilogue purposefully unbelievable the aim for the audience to play well and win out in the end. So from the start one knows to pay attention, to look out for bluff and stake, for hand and poker face, this symbolic endeavour becoming literal when Tarot cards begin to figure in the plot. Well its more of a concept, its components and tangents than a conventional story, a study in a mother and son who use psychic powers to provide solace to Romes rich and needy, the mother perhaps a fraud, the son true wielder of power chafing against life and surroundings. Others are drawn in to this arrangement, strange desires are revealed as well as some pretty strange and occasionally disturbing events, but its not so much a plotted film as themed (fate, truth and falsehood, industrial decay etc), the story breaking apart in the second half to hatch meaning from confusion. Its interesting stuff albeit rather slow, powerfully brought to life by Maurizio degli Espositi as Son and Lucia Bose as Mamma. The former brings a constant feel of clammy, detached malignity, the latter affecting in a run down and rough hewn, sneaky but practical manner. They play well off each other, with unsettling undercurrents reaching a head around the halfway mark with a chilling act of violence. Writer director Giulio Questi fortunately is a master of his imagery, so though the pace is slow and visuals restrained they are near perfectly chosen, around half the strange sights contributing to the themes of the film, the other half the uncanny weirdness sprung forth from these themes. Like the bones that Son find peeking from wasteground to the backdrop of bleak tower blocks, symbol of rot just beneath city skin, compared with a bizarre incident involving frogs, expression of revolution. A little more the way of events would have gone a long way in this one, as though appropriate, the final block is lacking a little in impact. There aren't enough real jolts and though things are generally creepy enough to earn the tag of horror it really is on the fringes. And whilst an overarching theme emerges there are interesting currents that go underexplored, bits and pieces that could have been better developed. Still a film that rather fascinated me and one that has played long in my mind in the ten or so days since I saw it. One for fans of the stranger end of Italian horror and surrealism outright, others may be less impressed.